VKontakte (VK) is the most popular social media in Russia that has 75 million Russian users. Any business can find its target audience here. Below you can find information about advertising on VKontakte: how it works, what are the types of ads, and what are the billing options.
VKontakte is an analog of Facebook. It has more or less the same functions and interface. It has a feed, various groups, and communities, and people have personal accounts where they can send messages to each other, create their posts, listen to music, and watch videos.
On VK main page, you can find the menu to the left, feed in the middle and the feed settings to the right.
Types of advertising in VK
As in Facebook on Vkontakte, there are many promotional tools.
1. Targeted advertising – ads are showing only to target users. Suitable for increasing brand awareness, sales, attracting new subscribers to groups, registrations.
2. Advertising in communities / VK Market platform – advertising placement in communities where the post or repost comes out marked as “advertisement”.
We mainly focus on targeted advertising due to a simple reason – it is easier to control and optimize. Ineffective ads and audiences can be turned off or updated at any time. We analyze the effectiveness and optimize ads for better results.
Formats of target advertising
1. In-feed ads
The ad gets into the user’s news feed – along with posts from his friends or communities from subscriptions.
Below you can see types of ads: carousel, action button, getting registrations, post promotion, ads in stories, website promotion.
2. Ads in the left block under the menu
In the desktop version of the VKontakte website, the user sees ads in the left block – under the menu. Small text-graphic banners are divided into three types, depending on the purpose:
Apps, Community, Website.
VK ad targeting options
Various parameters are available to select the target audience to which the ad will show on VK. The ad can be set based on these parameters, geography, demography, interests, other communities’ followers, education and work, types of devices, etc. These settings allow reaching target people in the right place and at the right time.
Payment for the advertising
The last step is to set up a payment for an advertisement. The rate and the payment model should be chosen at this step.
There are two payment models on Vkontakte: CPC and CPM
CPC (Cost Per Click): pay per click
You will be charged every time there will be an ad click.
CPM (Cost Per Mille): pay for 1000 impressions
You will be charged for every 1000 impressions of your ad.
All in all, Vkontakte is one of the best options to promote a business to its target audience in Russia. Before starting the advertisement it is important to understand what stands behind the promotion and how the system works. Understanding customer behavior, cultural characteristics, and profound knowledge of the Russian language are highly needed in order to gain efficient results.